Description

Explore a forsaken temple and marvel at its technological artifacts from another world. This project will help you learn how to utilize Substance in Unreal Engine 4, so as to texture next-gen assets with greater efficiency. The integration works as a free plugin which you can grab on https://www.allegorithmic.com/substance-ue4

Substance in Unreal Engine 4 allows game developers to use all the power of Substance to deliver a unique experience to the final user.

In-engine texture iteration
PBR (Physically-Based Rendering) Substance files were created Substance Designer and simply imported in the scene. The Substance plugin in UE4 allows access to all parameters of the textures to keep on tweaking while seeing the final result in real-time in the Editor. Having access to all these parameters allows you to create very simple and efficient material templates and keep iterating on them in-engine without having to go back and forth into other software.

Download size reduction
In this project, the texture package size is reduced from 2GB to a bit more than 100MB once the project is packaged for shipping. There is no quality loss compared to standard textures as it is not a compression method per se. The gain in size comes from the fact that Substance files are storing a parametric description of the textures rather than the texture images themselves. The Substances are regenerated during the first launch and there is no further performance hit from using them after they are generated.

Dynamic textures
Any parameters of a Substance texture can be modified at runtime, either animating them through time or reacting to the player’s actions. This can be done simply via the Blueprint editor.